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Summary of the impact

Newcastle research into the lives of American Civil War soldiers and
veterans has had both public and educational impact. In particular the
research has: (i) challenged traditional social assumptions concerning war
wounds and the medical and political responses to these; (ii) greatly
extended the range and improved the quality of evidence pertaining to the
history of warfare and wounding in the United States; (iii) expanded
public understanding of the long-term effects of the Civil War on American
society; and (iv) informed and influenced the content of secondary and
tertiary education on this subject in the UK and the US.

Underpinning research

The research explores the social, military and medical history of
nineteenth-century warfare and its memorialisation in the context of the
transition from the cabinet wars of the pre-Napoleonic era to the mass
volunteer/conscript armies of the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries.

Specifically, it traces the life experiences of a selection of Union (2,
3, 4) and Confederate soldiers from the start of the Civil War
through to the first decades of the twentieth century through official
military records, personal correspondence and memoirs, medical memoirs and
official medical records from the armies, hospitals, insane asylums and
homes for disabled veterans, with a specific emphasis on Confederate
soldiers and veterans from Tennessee and South Carolina.

The research has established links between hitherto discrete elements in
Civil War-era scholarship by bringing together medical, military, literary
and social history. It has uncovered a far more robust and supportive
system of southern veteran care, in the form of artificial limbs
programmes, medical care, and educational and social initiatives than
historians previously believed existed in the post-war American South,
alongside more disturbing evidence of the long-term medical and social
problems that affected Civil War veterans in both North and South (1,
4, 5). For Confederate veterans, in particular, the social
assumptions surrounding the South's role in the Civil War informed the
kind of care that they received, especially in regard to institutional
care in later life (1). The assumption by the state of the kind of
medical and material support previously provided by soldiers' families not
only emphasises the shift from the local to the national, the private to
the public sphere in the nineteenth-century South, but locates the
veteran—especially the wounded veteran—as the living link not just between
the `Old South' and the `New,' but between the individual and the national
body. In this respect, the research traces a broader trajectory within
nineteenth-century conflict and nation-building in relation to warfare,
its personal psychological and physical outcomes, its emotional and
economic impact, and the role of the state and society in supporting
"citizen soldiers" whose own role was informed, but also constrained by
the context of nineteenth-century nationalist expectations.

Finally, the research has uncovered the lineaments of our contemporary
reactions to warfare, its risk-averse elements, its assumptions of mental
and moral damage (in the form of Post Traumatic Stress) as well as its
more disturbing and inflated assumptions about the possibilities of
physical rehabilitation in the post-war era, a topic that has
traditionally been more closely associated, by scholars and the public
alike, with the First World War in Europe (2). In terms of its
impact, it seeks to locate the United States within the public discourse
surrounding war wounding and individual and social reconstruction and
renewal from which it has, to date, largely been excluded.

Susan-Mary Grant, the key researcher, was Reader, then Professor of
American History for the duration of the research.

References to the research

1. Grant, Susan-Mary, `The Lost Boys: Citizen-Soldiers, Disabled
Veterans, and Confederate Nationalism in the Age of People's War,' Journal
of the Civil War Era, 2:2 (2012): 233-259. REF2 Output: 170595.

2. Grant, Susan-Mary, `Constructing a commemorative culture: American
veterans and memorialization from Valley Forge to Vietnam, Journal of
War and Culture Studies, 4:3 (2011):305-322. Available from HEI.

3. Grant, Susan-Mary, `A Season of War: Warriors, Veterans and Warfare in
American Nationalism,' in François Gemenne and Susana Carvalho (eds), Nations
and their Histories: Constructions and Representations (London:
Palgrave, 2009): 237-254. Available from HEI.

5. Grant, Susan-Mary, `Reconstructing the National Body: Masculinity,
Disability and Race in the American Civil War,' Proceedings of the
British Academy, 154 (2008): 273-317. REF2 Output: 30827.

Table of relevant grants:

Principal
Investigator

Grant
Title

Sponsor

Period
of Grant

Value

Susan-Mary Grant

Civil War Veterans and the Reconstruction of the American Nation
(RF/11011)

Leverhulme Trust

October 2007 to January 2008

£14,574

Susan-Mary Grant

A Season of War: Sacrifice, Survival and the Reconstruction of
American Nationalism, 1861-1920 (AH: G004412/1)

AHRC

September to December 2009

£21,830

Details of the impact

The underpinning research has impacted on a very wide range of
beneficiaries, including higher education educators and students across
the United States (US); history teachers and school children in the UK;
war veterans and the wider public who have an interest in the American
Civil War more generally.

Pathway to impact: in October 2007, research outcomes were
disseminated via the Sarah Tryphena Phillips lecture at the British
Academy in London, subsequently published in 2008 (5). The public
(on-line recording and print) dissemination by the British Academy of this
lecture, combined with research conducted in the US Army Medical archives
at the Walter Reed Hospital in Washington the following year and
additional outputs produced from the research in 2008 and 2009, led to the
researcher being invited to devise and produce an educational module for
the US National Library of Medicine (NLM) in Washington, D.C, which is the
world's largest biomedical library. That a UK scholar, rather than an
American one, was approached (there is hardly a shortage of American
medical humanities experts) evidences the impact of the research beyond
the HEI.

Informing and Influencing the Form and Content of Education

The resultant educational module on the theme of war wounding and Civil
War medicine, Reconstructing State and Soldier: Disability and the
American Civil War, was developed for use in college and university
undergraduate and graduate courses across the US. The module, which was
launched in March 2011 on the NLM website, draws directly on the research
insights and explores the ways in which hitherto separate fields of
scholarship, on disability studies, on the Civil War, military, medical,
literary, social and political history, can be brought together to expand
understanding of both the immediate and longer-term impact of wounding in
that conflict. Though grounded in the history of the American Civil War,
the module is geared toward use by instructors and students from a variety
of disciplinary backgrounds, including history, cultural studies,
literature, the social history of medicine, and social science programs
more broadly. Each of the six one-hour classes provides both further
readings and discussion questions designed to: (i) develop students'
understanding of the physical and mental impact of the war upon soldiers
North and South; (ii) contrasts the perspectives of the soldiers
themselves with the surgeons who treated them; and (iii) positions both
within the broader context of nineteenth-century attitudes toward
disability generally and war veterans specifically (IMP1).

The module accompanies and was designed to be used alongside an NLM
exhibition to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War,
Life and Limb: The Toll of the Civil War. Following a special
display within the NLM from March to July 2011, the exhibition is
available online, and through two six-banner travelling exhibitions, which
are booked by schools, universities, museums, libraries, cultural centres
or history societies. The visual material in the exhibition, derived from
the NLM's archives and photographic holdings, provides further
illustrations of the research themes, such as the performative dimensions
of Civil war surgery, the public reaction to and support for the wounded
of war, and the psychological effects of the war on its combatants (IMP2).

Coverage of this exhibition and usage of the educational module is
national across the US. The website has had 14,774 online visitors (IP
address based) and 43,001 page views by those visitors (IMP3). In
the REF period, the travelling banner exhibitions have already been on
display at 24 locations across 10 states. The impact will extend beyond
the REF period as the exhibition (with accompanying education modules) has
been commissioned for further displays at 38 additional locations across
the US, and two in Liverpool, UK in 2015 to mark the 150th anniversary of
the end of the American Civil War (IMP3). The response to the
online module and exhibition has been positive. It has been described as
`beautifully and thoughtfully put together' and `highly recommended' (IMP3).
The exhibition has been included in the British Library's curated list of
Civil War websites, noting its audience as teachers, schools and the
general public (IMP4).

As well as impact having been achieved via the educational module,
research outputs produced specifically for mixed audiences have raised
awareness of the research insights and themes. For example, Grant produced
a 150,000 word study, A Concise History of the United States of
America (2012) as part of the noted Cambridge Concise Histories
series, "intended both as university and college textbooks and as general
historical introductions for general readers, travelers, and members of
the business community". Sales as at the end of July 2013 were c.2,500,
with over 1,000 of these in the US, and the remainder in the UK, Australia
and the rest of the world (IMP5). In recognition of the fact that
a work on US History by a non-American is likely to have greatest impact
in the Latin American countries, Cambridge University Press is having the
work (in 2013) translated into Portuguese (for Brazil) and Spanish.

As a result of a British Academy Sarah Tryphena Phillips public lecture
at the University of Edinburgh in 2008, Grant was invited to contribute an
article on the research to a general educational publication aimed at
secondary school teachers in Scotland ("Conflict and Commemoration:
Centennials, Sesquicentennials and the Ongoing Battle over America's
History,' History Teaching Review yearbook, 25 (January 2011):
63-78"). The yearbook is available to all members of Scottish Association
of Teachers of History (SATH), which "seeks to raise awareness of the
importance of History within the Scottish Curriculum" and the yearbook and
includes "academic articles on topics of relevance to the Scottish history
curriculum" (IMP6). As a direct result of this article, Grant was
invited to talk about the research to pupils at Stewart's Melville College
in Edinburgh.

Extending the range and improving the quality of evidence to enhance
public understanding

The broader public impact of the research can be evidenced through its
dissemination in the popular media. Examples include: BBC History Magazine
150th Anniversary Edition, The American Civil War Story (June 2013); BBC
History Magazine (commissioned article) `Help for Heroes' (circulation of
c.70,000 per issue) (IMP7); the BBC World Service (25th March,
2013).

The research was presented as part of a Royal British Legion-sponsored
series of seminars on the theme of Remembrance (http://www.remembrancereseminars.org.uk/),
held between 2008 and 2010 at the National Memorial Arboretum (NMA) in
Staffordshire and at the Royal British Legion in London. Grant was
co-presenter at one seminar and delivered lectures at another two: in
September, 2009, she delivered a lecture on `Constructing a Commemorative
Culture: American Veterans from Valley Forge through Vietnam'; this was
subsequently published (2). The research informed a lecture to an
audience of war widows on "Mourning Becomes Electra: Women and the
Commemoration of the Confederate Dead," at the Women, War and Remembrance
Conference held at the NMA in March 2010. The Convener of the NMA seminars
highlighted how "Charlie Bagot-Jewitt, then chief executive of the
National Memorial Arboretum, had identified a need to understand why
remembrance had achieved such a significant growth in popular resonance
in Britain over the preceding decade". She also advised that "the
seminars have informed the development of interpretation and education
at the National Memorial Arboretum and the development of £2 million
Remembrance Interpretation Centre being included within the £15 million
redevelopment of the Arboretum's visitor facilities due to begin in late
2013. This is partially being funded by a Heritage Lottery Grant" (IMP8).

The seminars led to the research being included in a Royal British Legion
publication: "Stigmata of Stone: Monuments and Markers in the Memorial
Landscape of the United States of America," in Maggie Andrews et al.
(eds.), Lest We Forget: Remembrance and Commemoration (Stroud: The
History Press, 2011) a publication aimed at the general public and
marketed in, e.g., the Wellcome bookshop and at memorial sites, e.g., the
National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire. (IMP9).